PLOT: Ogata makes illicit pornographic films to support his widowed landlady, who is also his lover, and her two teenage children. The widow believes her ex-husband was reincarnated as a carp she keeps in a fishbowl next to the bed and that he disapproves of the arrangement, but she cannot control herself. When she dies, she insists Ogata marry her daughter, but the pornographer has become impotent and obsessed with building a mechanical woman to be the perfect mate.

BACKGROUND:

Shôhei Imamura apprenticed as an assistant director under Yasujirô Ozu, and although he was considered a major figure in the Japanese New Wave, his movies are little known outside his native land. In the West, The Pornographers is his best-known work.

The scenario was based on a 1963 novel by Akiyuki Nosaka (who also wrote the story on which Grave of the Fireflies was based).

The Pornographers was made by Nikkatsu studios, who ironically turned from producing art films to making pornography (“pink films”) soon after the scandal over Seijun Suzuki‘s “incomprehensible” Branded to Kill in 1967.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Shôhei Imamura frames many of the shots in The Pornographers oddly, including a couple of bedroom scenes viewed through a fish tank; the idea is that we are watching the jealous carp as he spies on his human wife making love to Ogata. The weirdest of these shots, however, has to be a Haru’s deathbed scene, also shot through the carp cam—improbably, this time, from above, as if the fish is looking down from heaven on the spouse who is soon to join him.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A cavalcade of perversions flecked with short dream sequences and unannounced flashbacks, almost every scene in The Pornographers is eccentric, if not flatly surreal. The main character delivers a philosophical monologue as he walks though an orgy, the matron freaks out to the surf-rock soundtrack in her head, and a new wife strips to garter and stockings as she walks down the corridor to meet her mother-in-law for the first time. Although the story is based in realism, the film’s tone is melodramatic and dreamily erotic—but, ironically, hardly pornographic at all.

Original trailer for The Pornographers

COMMENTS: The key to understanding The Pornographers may be found in its Japanese subtitle, which didn’t make it into the title’s English translation. “Erogotoshitachi” yori Jinruigaku nyūmon can be translated as “’The Pornographers’: An Introduction to Anthropology” or “An Introduction to Anthropology Through the Pornographers.” Although The Pornographers is set in a specific time and place—Japan during the postwar economic boom—it is a work of anthropology, not sociology. Shôhei Imamura believes that pornography can be a lens that reveals something about our essential nature, a belief reflected in pornographer Ogata’s tearful epiphany, “human beings are made this way.”

Ogata’s business interests includes not only homemade porn movies, which he shoots guerrilla style in public parks and dingy warehouses, using four cameras at a time to save on duplication costs, but also dirty novels, aphrodisiacs, covert recordings of neighbors’ lovemaking sessions, and customized pimping services for wealthy clients. His private life shows equal erotic variety: he’s sleeping with his landlady Haru and lusting after her teenage daughter Keiko, while she and her son Koichi have an Oedipal relationship that’s nearly as scandalous as anything in the pornographer’s films. Voyeurism, incest, pseudo-pedophilia, panty-sniffing, prostitution, orgies, and exploitation of the mentally handicapped may all be part of Ogata’s daily routine, as are shakedowns by gangsters, harassment from the cops, and familial turf battles with a resentful and jealous Koichi. Ogata’s situation is exaggerated because of his vocation as procurer, but Imamura presents this messy jumble of erotic longings and selfish jostling for advantage as a bleak image of human existence.

Strangely, despite all the bad things Ogata does—seducing his landlady while peeping at her daughter, slapping Keiko around for calling him “filthy”—he remains a likable, and even tragic, character. Partly this is because he feels keen guilt, symbolized by the carp and the scar on Keiko’s leg, omens that put in an appearance when his lust is getting the best of him. Ogata prides himself on being “honest,” yet he has no problem presenting a forged doctor’s certificate to a client who has requested a virgin for the night. Nonetheless, while he lives a lie, pretending to sell medical products instead of smut, Ogata is “honest” in some sense; he supplies men with their real, unedited fantasies. He is loyal to his fellow pornographers, whom he always treats fairly, and to the makeshift family he supports—up until they die off, reject, or betray him. His love for Haru appears to be genuine, and somehow isn’t sullied by his uncontrollable lust for her daughter, a fact that the widow accepts and acknowledges when she proposes he marry the girl after her death. Ogata can’t control his urges, or give up on his calling to provide other men with their sickest desires. He ends up spent, jaded, and impotent, disillusioned with humanity and with the messy reality of love; left alone to vainly pursue a perfect, mechanical eroticism, free from conflict and pain.

It’s certainly possible to view this film, as liberal critics instinctually do, as an attack on the sexual repressiveness of then-contemporary Japanese society. I think there is far more evidence, naturally, that The Pornographers is a criticism not of the post-war society’s repressiveness, but of its growing permissiveness. Democracy, capitalism and personal liberty were new concepts to the Japanese, whose pre-war culture had been built around values of obedience, duty and honor. In The Pornographers, Ogata embraces the new values, perversely, almost out of a sense of civic duty, advising Keiko to read books on democracy instead of pornography. Ogata throws out the magical carp, a symbol of authentic Japanese religion and culture, and it returns to haunt him, and presumably is responsible for his eventual karmic backlash. Throughout the film, pornography linked to democracy and capitalism. A fellow pornographer argues in favor of incest and orgies, suggesting that sexual perversion is a way to transcend the human condition and find true freedom. “You’re misinterpreting democracy,” the progressive Ogata insists. But pornographic literature of the type he purveys as “social welfare” is the first spur that leads Keiko to eventually whore herself; when he warns her not to fill her head with such filth (“that’s for stupid adults”), she distracts him from his lecture by offering to let him kiss her. These desires—these urges—may be natural to humans, but pursuing them freely leads to destruction of the family, and to the downfall of both Keiko and Ogata.

Pornography is one-sided: it promises perfect sexual fulfillment without having to negotiate the matter with another person. The pornographic fantasy image is always willing to perform. It never has a headache or a qualm. “A woman’s body strikes me as dirty,” muses Ogata’s partner in porn. “Doing it yourself is much better.” The pornographers may indeed offer freedom—freedom from repression, freedom from taboo—but is it worth the price? Adrift all alone in a shack with his “Dutch wife,” Ogata has “true freedom”; but, he has given up on all humanity, not just women. Given unfettered freedom to pursue their desires, The Pornographers asserts, men will withdraw from community. “Human beings were made this way,” weeps Ogata, in an anthropological mood. We are made of lust, greed, repressed desires, fetishes, and pain; the only way to escape is to excise our own humanity, mechanize the problem away, replace messy sex with perfect porn.

The Pornographers – The original Japanese novel in a 1968 translation by Michael Gallagher

DVD INFO: The Pornographers (buy) was acquired and restored by the Criterion Collection in 2003. Unfortunately, this disc has none of the extra features Criterion is famous for; it includes only the original trailer and a booklet with an essay by J. Hoberman, making this the closest thing to a bare-bones release the revered label has ever put out.

366 Weird Movies is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

PRIVACY POLICY (in brief): Email addresses are required for posting comments, solely to verify your identity and to deter comment spam. We will not send you any commercial emails or solicitations.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.
You can find a more detailed assessment of our privacy policy on our privacy policy page .

Copyright 2008-2019 366 Weird Movies.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DO NOT REPRINT WITHOUT PERMISSION; except that, if accompanied by a link or url citation to the original, short excerpts of material may be quoted for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.